Mar 29 2013
CapTech Believes in Community: SQLSaturday Richmond Virginia
On March 9, 2013, SQLSaturday #187 came to Richmond VA at the University of Richmond. SQLSaturday is a community event, supported by the Professional Association for SQL Server, which provides free training for SQL Server and business intelligence professionals. With a great line up of speakers, sponsors, and volunteers from all over, it was a well-run, educational, and enjoyable event.
CapTech sponsored the event as a Gold sponsor and talked to a variety of professionals from the Richmond and surrounding areas. CapTech also provided three speakers to share their knowledge on reporting, business intelligence, and data quality. Finally, CapTech had many of their consultants attend to participate in the conversation and enhance their education. Some of the sessions attended are highlighted below by our attendees.
Dashboards...How To Choose Which MSBI Tool, presented by Melissa Coates
Mar 28 2013
2013 Charlotte SharePoint Saturday: New Technologies, Same Challenges
Charlotte’s SharePoint Saturday was buzzing with the new technologies surrounding SharePoint 2013, but continued to demonstrate the core challenges when implementing solutions on this platform.
With strong regional and some national representation from the speakers, the daylong event offered insights ranging from development techniques to full Cloud based implementations. Within “the Cloud” domain, sessions discussed the traditional channel of SharePoint Online, but also leveraging Azure to build entire 2013 Farms in an off-premise environment. From a development standpoint, users are excited to embrace SharePoint as a development platform, especially considering the use of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. PowerShell also took center stage; not only for Farm deployment, but options for managing content in bulk and interaction with workflows.
Mar 26 2013
How to Criticize Your Boss
Not everyone gets to be a leader, and most leaders are also followers in their own right. The project manager follows instructions from the project sponsor, the CEO from the board, the politicians from the polls, and so on. Whoever you are, you spend a lot more time following than leading. As Bob Dylan put it so well, "you gotta serve somebody."
The good follower is not a "yes man". In the professional world I inhabit those who move "up" the hierarchy tend to retire technical skills in favor of architecture, proposal writing, and management. The relationship of manager to employee becomes more like agent to actor or musician, where the supervised employee is the "talent".
In these conditions the old concept of top-down decision making seems quaint. Important choices require information from all perspectives, and organizations shut out those with knowledge of the details at their peril. The best decision makers search out diverse ideas before choosing a direction.
Mar 26 2013
Final Thoughts from the Gartner BI Summit in Dallas, TX
Now that I’m back from the Gartner BI Summit in Dallas, TX and have had the chance to get my thoughts around all the information presented last week, I wanted to summarize the recurring themes presented across the various speakers. The themes of the conference are presented as questions to ask yourself, your team and your company.
Big Data is here, and it has many forms. Well, OK, I admit that not every company will have a need to analyze “Big Data”. But if you have a reasonably large website (clickstream data), sell to consumers (online forum postings, social network commentary), or any other electronic data that is generated by or about your company or products, then you need to be aware of the potential benefits. This data can include many different forms – YouTube video, social web postings on Facebook, online product reviews, or non-transaction oriented application log files. What data can you extract from these to determin
Mar 25 2013
Live Blogging from The Gartner BI Summit in Dallas, TX - Day 3
Day 3
The closing day of the Gartner BI Conference has arrived. Time to look through the seminar list and pick anything I haven’t yet had a chance to gain additional exposure on, or would like to hear from a potentially different angle. I will also be curious to see if the themes noted during the first two days continue into the third.
The day opened with an 8:15am presentation by Bill Holtzmann on Building a BI Strategy. Some of his comments were similar to other speakers. High points include:
- Your strategy should include:
- Why are we doing this?
- What are the processes to be implemented?
- Who is involved?
- What will the high-level schedule be, and when?
- How will we accomplish our objectives?
DO’s: